After taking a gulp of water, M. opens a new Word document, inhaling deeply. He begins to write a sort of Introduction or Author’s Note:

‘This is to be my first real poem. No *******, cheesy rhyming or painfully forced verbiage. I am now only a seeker of truth…’

M., having just crushed two Focalin pressed pills, rolls a five-dollar bill and proceeds to insufflate, pausing momentarily when the line is halfway finished; he exhales before immediately finishing it off. His sinus burns fiercely. There is something masochistic about his preferred method of ingestion w/r/t pills. And but with a sudden albeit expected (in fact, M. was utterly beholden to it) rush of vitality, M. spends the next ten minutes finishing his half-page poetic manifesto [sic] (which term he actually wrote as a heading. “Poetic Manifesto”, that is), before beginning what he considers to be the first stanza. He likes that the location of the beginning of his poem is ambiguous. And so he begins thusly, consciously avoiding conventional rhyme scheme, instead opting for what he considers to be abstract.

‘My first poem, ostensibly an attempt at catharsis, was in fact a failed expression of my latent desire to be accepted. For today it’s a poem and last week a novel; tomorrow I’ll ferociously ******* some fashionably obscure, formidably pretentious prose [sic]. Consuming all but absorbing nothing…’

If he is to discover vicious truths [sic] in his writing, he cannot hold anything back. He thinks of a double-entendre using the word ‘blunt’, but decides not to employ it. Perhaps yesterday. Suddenly, M. begins to ruminate on his poem from the day before, which had earned him the opposite of acclaim from his peers. He must simply do the opposite of what he had done before! When he resumes writing, M. eventually begins to subconsciously fall back into the 12-syllable AABB rhyme scheme of his yesterday’s poem.

‘…Perhaps the following phase will stick for more than a wretched week.
Why have I wasted words on wan, vapid, wheezing lines
Of sickeningly phony, sophomoric, pseudo-sentimental ****?
Surely you see the salient theme,
That from which I hide,
Refusing to acknowledge life’s flaccid, tan **** as it floats in front of me,
Beckoning me forth,
A one-eyed, furiously fetid viper...’

M. chortles at his alliterative stanza’s ending. ‘This is how I write,’ he mutters to himself, maintaining a straight face. He writes without pause for nearly an hour. He is pleased.

‘…A generalist—that’s what I tell myself I am,
Because simply knowing a few facts,
Even for forty or fifty fields,
Is surely worthy of that
Respect which is given to those men and women
Who earn it by grinding away
At that which determine the sycophant vermin
Is worthy of lifting a lash…’

Hours pass. The poem approaches two thousand words in length. After taking a truncated cigarette break (the break, not the cigarette, was truncated), M. continues where he left off.*

‘…Believe you not for a second the frost-bitten-phallus,
That Freudian façade [sic],
The false faces I display to fake friends
Whose frequent fornication
Fills my mind with fossilized fleas,
******-spiritual formication [sic]
For which there’s no vaccine…

…Once I’ve come down from the mountainous apogee atop which I sit,
Calmly surveying the ever-receding landscape through the lens of fleeting euphoria
Which, fading faster always, gives way to—no, I will not say it—I refuse to legitimate her lies.
As I descend with increasing speed,
specters of judgment torment me into insanity…
    
B  r  e
a   t  h
     e  ;

...this feeling I simply cannot bear—
their sirens threaten to burst my eardrums.
Although it’s undoubtedly pathetic,
I can no longer lie to myself;
I desire the approval
of those specters
who haunt
m-
e
...’

M. begins to hyperventilate, panicking at his embarrassment at publishing such a bad poem the day before. He grasps his heart, which is beating out of his chest. The fear of cardiac arrest simply increases his anxiety. Laying down on the ****-carpeted floor, M. attempts to meditate, imagining this to be how it might feel to do TM on *******. Minutes then an hour pass.
Suddenly, a much-welcomed epiphany presents itself to M.; as if it fluttered through his window and hovered, eerily still in the way that only hummingbirds can be, just in front of his face. So obvious does it seem (the epiphany) that he begins to laugh maniacally in the pitch of a female voice either pre-pubescent or near-dead; a kind of

YEE!    

YEE!      

YEE!    

HEEEE!

HE!

HEE!                      

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

sound.
After minutes of uncontrollable mirth, M. holds his abdomen and makes the lugubrious [sic], delirious noises of tired suffering. After a few more YEE’s and HEEEE’s escape, he begins to regain control, trying not to focus on what he’d realized w/r/t futility as it relates to shame, but certainly ensuring that he won’t forget. M. sits in his chair with a old-man grunt, the sort of noise over which wives divorce their husbands.
He sips water.
M. opens a new document and begins to type:

For what do we write, we talentless wretches?
To publish some
gooey garbage
in hopes
that some fleet of demonic tween-age sociopaths
adopts our work as part of the canon of cuntiness?  

Not we, the veritable “un-poets”,
Our haphazardly-conceived writing stinks,
No, it reeks of fetid, smegmatic phalluses;
Of a ****** of maniacal madmen,
Blue-balled after an abysmal night/morning
Tossing crumpled ***** of money
At Patti’s plump-lipped, positively putrid-looking

&&&&               *****               &&&&

In an I-95 truck stop;
“Taste **** and *****
At Trucker Tom’s ***** Taphouse
                                        Where friends meet
                                            and literally throw money
                                              into syphilitic snatches.”

We write for the duty of identity,
We who might be found with a serious face on,
Writing rhyming, rhythmic,
quasi-**** lines of lead-heavy, snobbish lifeforce-larcen.
The sort of **** that keeps you from getting up in the morning.

But of course we are writers, as sure as the sea
Is blue, the day is long, who daresay that I am wrong?
And he who
doth [sic] dare,
I point to that long
******* I posted
ere the day began.
There lies his evidence though it belongs in the can.

I unload your god in that laissez-faire way
where the bandages mend and have no need to be placed,
formidably, regret to admit the moonshine in my hair
looking Gothic, but beautiful:
sober the men’s breath as it falls, falls, falls
not more mild than a snowstorm in its final lapse.

Sat there to be dreamt. He put his hand to his beard,
and I would have kissed if had I believed
that he was not merely trying to haunt my body,
the hair I kneaded into air.

It flowers, and flowing these marzipan sands
where God lays man next to his wife,
she bears the peaches: juicy, ripened, but not to eat
expecting us to swallow ourselves in turn, spin the bottle.
I could not care less for the braces in his lips –
or their fur, but gums beneath like peaches.

**** it out until the pulps mirror,
you have the skin of a four fruit, or an eighty,
flames high as kites. But suffering for each flicker-****
and dating a girl who smokes cigarettes in bed,
I know he could not support that, your god.

Morning comes with a glare, now eating her hair
the involvement of some odd raconteurs. I beat them
and they beat my ******* for their heat –
God is a cabin boy with genitals in his palms,
said he would love the women as long as they are gone;
if he does not see me, the flames, I cannot exist
not more than falling falling falling hair.

Can I show you how beautiful you are? Can I take out the old photo albums and push my index finger into the faces, the places, and seas? I want to peel back the plastic and remove the square photographs from their sticky setting. I'm alluding to ideas that exist more formidably on the internet- there are no paper photographs, no sticky settings, there aren't even faces in the numbers; it's only ever been you or me.

Some of my things are crooked. The strings don't work, the wires are twisted and make the sounds all come out funny. There's a strange buzzing everywhere, it's like Mickey's gray cloud, a cloud Koopa throwing spiked shells from Park Avenue beach to Montrose street. Everything is quiet, consuming, unassuming and still recalcitrant. I'm showing nothing to nobody. Coaxing storm systems and netting foul play and ***** tricks, with my pants around my ankles or my fly unzipped.

I'm stinking of this stuff. These sudorific crevices on the insides of my thighs. I'm more or less always pacing. Rocking. Rolling. Small room I'm living room, cadavers I stuff my skinny fingers inside of- cold, wet hollow places I'm seeking skin covered gods in. I'm craving tastes and flavors. I'm looking at these pictures of me, of my face and the clothes I wore, the people that knew me. Where have I disappeared to? Every place that I went, every condition of my humanness has gone. Five minutes past my certainty, squirting hot molten magma from my ****, my lips, and my fingertips. Hysterical thoughts and homily. I want just a hello. I want just a hello.

Jealousy, a final decree.
Admittedly a fallacy submitted formidably... impervious?
She'll move onto sea.
Move on from those who can't see.
They'll show us what it means to see.

Presently a mistaken alignment of aliment, yet so indicative of the deceptive.
An intervention of emancipation requires degradation of the love that relegates, brainless.
Vindictive of the culture, fault, to penance, too addicted.
Somehow she heads an isle of the vile whom are consumed by denial.
Normality brushed aside with the hand whom highlights brushed, melting eyes.
Life, an achievable yet inconceivable lie shrouded by personality.
Subjective to the respective hospitality.
"Aint no love for thee..."

I have been given the boon of freedom
My feet were kicking placed
upon a journey
to discover the exhilarating arctic air
upon the mountain named Independence
It wasn't my idea
to forsake the traditions of my mothers
who each built homes and took the names of men in their youth
whose strength lay in raising strong
children and learning how to be formidably equal partners
It was not my first choice
me, who had from almost infanthood
idolized love
and longed to be rescued by a darling prince
I think perhaps I was my lineage's silliest daughter
my flights of fancy almost ruined me
the cliffs of my foothills more dangerous than the peak
I now eagerly climb toward
For now I see that glittering helm
that sun graced pyramid
that promises the reward
that self-love brings
Peace
the complete rest of contentment
the gift of eternal passion
that can never be stolen
or caused to be ****** inside a desperate pairing
There is no need for a marriage of convenience
Nor a tryst of loneliness
No shackles formed from crippling self-consciousness
But only deep, thrilling, ice-cold self-acceptance
I AM whole

there is a desert, lives inside me
she grows large, while I grow tiny

she likes to come around at times throughout the day
she puts my mind to sleep and keeps my friends at bay

when did she come? I do not know
how'd she arrive? When will she go?

I think and think and think and think until I fall asleep
and when I wake I cannot speak, can't even make a peep

she grows and grows within me, too fast to slow her down
but one can live inside me, how will I push her out?

It is hard to make decisions, they always lead to strife
but one here must be made, to end the others life

I plunge into this vacuum, ready for some fighting
I grab my bag of weapons and feel my blood igniting

I pull out creativity and she pulls out aggression
I then pull out vitality and she pull out depression

one swing one hit, one cut one blow, we battle on equitably
it looks as though I just might lose, she raises up formidably

high above her head, she wields one self-destruction
inside my mind I build one final plan construction

because I cannot fathom to let her win this fight
I take out my last weapon, and ****** my own life.

Potpurri
Dusted on this everlasting scented wish
*******
Path indulged not taken braken broken
Don't speak
How you polish your rod don't you dare
Purr in society
Of begotten socialistic days every sister
Brooling
Brothers have to unite under the semiotic
Nonsense
Sensual carousels are misinterpreted maps
Printed
On glossy paper sheets which formidably
Stretch
Everybody's hands wide open to traveling
Roads
Not taken hands not shaken feelings black
Holes

“And this drab spirit craving in sad eagerness,
Many basilisk twist and snarl afore my feet,
But every hour I am saved from that eternity,
Something silent is surely more  deserving,

Far on the ringing plains of windy ancient Troy,
I am a part of all that I have met all once before,
Yet all is a reality in mind forever and ever,
To rust spotted to always shine in use!

Altruist of courage where fore art thou,
Though the eupnea to my trivial life,
Endeared face of dawn from twilight glows yet,
I shall follow the sinking star for knowledge,

I don't know if time is passing or not,
Does it come together or as druthers?
Or is my future to be piled all at once,
Seek I still the truth divine in hopes to gain,

Take my hand and share divinity with me,
Abolition me thoroughly from my iniquity,
Surely it takes a lifetime to get over such pain,  
I never thought of an unhappy ending to procure,

I spent an entire life stuck in the labyrinth,
Thinking about how I will escape it and say,
Imagining what the future may hold for me,
How it will be on that formidably glorious day,
By Andrew Guzaldo 09/26/2018 ©

There is an old oak which sits formidably
Upon a tangle of spindly wooden arms
Which reach above from the grave
In the middle of a field
Otherwise totally barren.

The sun casts a shadow across the land
And just before it reaches its highest point
The shadow shows an unreflective image
Of a tree full of foliage.

At noon the shadow sinks into the earth
But as the hours pass, a new image occurs
Just as deceptive as the first,
Whereupon you will see the tree’s branches dead.

Whispers that the devil’s curse
Effects that half which so strangely
Refuses to mirror the other
Traverses between the two hills
Which make this town a valley.

It was the man who made his path
By endearing the hearts of the people
Who did see at this place
The last image which was burned into his cornea
Never to be seen.

No one could have guessed
That such a caring man
Was not the image he himself projected,
But it is the silent tears of an aching woman
Which would expose the inner soul.

For a time there was no sign
Except the scar which traced the woman’s face
From each tear duct
To the softened line of her jaw.

It was after the children had headed back
From their school houses
When she walked with light heart
Across the field, and headed home

As her mind considered the feeling of the breeze,
The freshness of a new school year,
The rich golden color
Which crowned the intricate web of branches above,
She was taken by surprise.

A pool of crimson covered the ground
In the shade of the oak tree
Which after the dry summer season
Quenched its thirst

The day following, the traveler was seen
Whistling as he walked
Across the field, with his belongings in hand
Stopping to admire the color which contrasted
Perfectly against the blue sky.

With a satisfied air, he left
Continuing in the direction of his original path
When suddenly, he stopped –
As did the mechanism within his ribcage
Which counted the seconds of life left.

When the spring season returned,
The tree no longer contrasted the sky
In all its glory, for one side no longer grew
And in the wind, the people fantasized visions
Of a man hanging from the southern limb.

There are times when all is afloat,
when no two waves fight,
a rock too appears light,
when all said, done, and thought,
all, absolutely, is right.
Then there comes the storm,
Violent.
Looking for refuge instinctively,
the comfort of former days long forgotten,
all there is is despair, weariness, in seas
in the selfsame stormy seas.
Why would the sense of security of old hold?
why would the memory refresh us and inspire?
why? The odds arise, setting themselves formidably
We try to rise up, shaken and distraught,
for we had fallen, short  of everything that is noble,
pure,honorable,praiseworthy...
Yet, through all days there remains the hope for all.
The man Christ Jesus

Body forwarding through the sky
Borders formidably tasking to skip
Bonds firmly threatening this shift
Bare feet touching the sand

Draped in all our sheets
we are the purest kind of white
When I'm tucked into your chest
just before the pouring light

The kiss upon my forehead
means a break within the truth
That we are formidably broken;
at our fall, we are uncouth

syncopate a sentence succinctly
take that thought and
slice and serrate across lines
synth steady and stolid syntax
stitch surrealism to sanity symphonically
scatter sadness, sow sunny spirit
slather language with excess
dole diction in dearth
depose dialectical dogma
dredge dreary dreams and not so drearies
foment formidably
froth and fracture finalities
syllogise spectacular speculation
simplify abtruse abnormalities
whet words wonderfully